Usually I am for freedom to do anything you want as long as it does not impact other people.
I am OK though with banning ads for sugary drinks because society pays a high medical cost for damage due to excess sugar addiction/use.
This is like forcing motor cycle riders to wear helmets.
BTW, I worked in Singapore for a while in 2016. Wonderful place! People just seemed happy there, from business people to laborers. If I were younger I might consider moving there for permanent work.
"This is like forcing motor cycle riders to wear helmets."
Which is the case in many countries including mine. When they enacted the law I was still a youngster driving his motorcycle, constantly speeding and doing those things people do in their 20s. I hated that law, then a few accidents and fractures later I realized that the "stupid" law probably saved my parents from the horror of outliving me. I'm also for 100% freedom of choice but it must not impact others and must be accompanied by 100% information about the consequences.
Back to the topic, if I drink shitty sugary drinks for years becoming fat and one day I get a fatal stroke, that's an error that can't be undone, so I'm all for limitation of freedom in this and similar cases.
Only as anecdata, I got my first motorcycle at 14 and that was several years before any Law made helmets compulsory.
My dad (who also was a motorcyclist) when giving me the bike told me that the helmet and gloves were the keys to start the engine:
"no helmet, no gloves, you cannot start the bike." <- and that last character was definitely a full stop or period.
A lot of friends didn't have the same imprimatur, and since it was not compulsory, rode happily their bikes without protections, and - even if I always wore the helmet according to the recommendation - I thought several times how futile it was, expecially for short rides/in the city until unfortunately a friend, just turned 19, died in a "stupid" accident, at no more than 30 km/h (he forgot the side stand down and pivoted on it, hitting a curb wiith his head).
In my 20s I was into extreme sports. Motorbikes, skydiving, freediving and the shebang. Just loved the adrenal rush.
One of my motorcycle instructors told me “motorbikes are insanely dangerous. They are essentially crotch rockets. Not wearing helmets is a deathwish and I’m pretty sure i’ll outlive you if you ignore the safety. Think about helmets and guards as those extra Mario lives. Your helmet will crack but your brain will be fine.”
Sane advice, i’ve cracked multiple helmets. Brain is doing fine.
For some reason this was one of the easiest rules from my father that I followed without problem. It felt natural from day 1. And being 15yo you don't normally agree with parents.
It's weird, I rode motorbikes off road as a teenager and wouldn't have dreamed of not wearing a helmet, heavy boots and gloves etc.
Just bought a new bike to commute to new job (starting on a 125 and working my way up since not been on a bike for 20 odd years) and while a helmet was thrown in it'll be the first upgrade after proper jacket/pants.
I still don't get why it's even a debate, I've cracked two bicycle helmets from accidents that weren't my faults in impacts that without them would have been vastly worse.
My favorite is getting throat-punched by a big juicy bug at 70 miles per hour. But yeah, getting one of those in the face (and near/in the eye especially) is something you do not want to happen.
> This is like forcing motor cycle riders to wear helmets.
Maybe this is a petty, pointless distinction, but I think they're quite different. Singapore banned the ads, not the actual consumption. Not wearing a helmet chiefly harms yourself, and it's hard to argue that it's immoral. Encouraging others not to wear a helmet, though... that seems pretty objectionable, just like ads for tobacco etc.
(Of course there are plenty of caveats needed to avoid a slippery slope, like drawing a distinction between advertisements and opinion pieces saying "helmets are bad".)
Yes, few restrictions are off the table. In reality, people don’t want more restrictions than necessary, so it’s usually not a problem. Here we even had resistance to mandatory helmets on bikes, settling for a law only for children.
There's a point there that I don't think gets enough discussion:
As healthcare becomes increasingly socialized, personal unhealthy choices become an attack on society at large.
Why wouldn't we ban sugary drinks altogether? Motorcycle riding even with a helmet? Maybe get rid of pasta. It's not clear to me where we should stop, if medical costs to society are a valid justification for reducing personal freedom...
Banning advertising is very different from banning the products themselves. The intent of advertising is to increase consumption so the impact is more widespread than personal choices. It’s in effect a form of meme pollution.
Almost any kind of change starts small and then builds up. I don't see anything to indicate that banning ads isn't just the first step in the process. Cigarettes have become more and more restricted over time and they also started with banning ads. If this doesn't alarm you yet, then will you be alarmed once they start banning ads for meat?
This is a ‘slippery slope’ fallacy, and your example even demonstrates its unlikelihood. Cigarettes have been around for a very long time, and the act of smoking them long-term is basically terminal behavior (which we’ve also known about for quite a while). Many countries have banned advertising or limited it, but even in many ‘progressive’ countries (eg Germany) cigarette advertisement is still alive and well. And I don’t know of a country where smoking is entirely banned.
So I don’t see any risk at all of sugary drinks going the way of schedule 1 drugs (which, themselves, are also experiencing international wave of decriminalization). Is it impossible? No; but that’s no reason to fear de-advertising as a step towards a ban.
“Smoking areas are permitted in non-public areas of hotels (i.e., smoking floors or smoking rooms) at the discretion of the patron.”
The Holy See banned selling tobacco, but not smoking it. Considering the countries size it had minimal impact. The odd situation was prior to this it had much lower prices so people where buying them inside the Vatican for others. Which created something of a moral hazard.
>This is a ‘slippery slope’ fallacy, and your example even demonstrates its unlikelihood.
That's the point. Change happens either through a revolution or a "slippery slope". You can call it a fallacy all you want, but think about how successful political change happens. Almost every instance starts small and keeps pushing the boundaries until the political change has happened. This is how you change people's values, so calling it a fallacy as though that's supposed to invalidate it isn't enough.
>And I don’t know of a country where smoking is entirely banned.
It has just been made exceedingly expensive, just like alcohol. To the degree that the vast majority of the cost is in taxes.
Furthermore, this is a long process. Just because they haven't been banned yet doesn't mean that it's not going to happen in the future.
>And I don’t know of a country where smoking is entirely banned.
Bhutan and Turkmenistan have banned the sale of tobacco. The aims of some countries, such as Finland, is to become tobacco free.
Countries are also doing things such as banning flavorings of tobacco. So would your argument then be that it's not a slippery slope, because they aren't actually going to ban sugary drinks, they'll just ban sugary drinks with flavorings?
> keeps pushing the boundaries until the political change has happened
... so you made a conclusion that political change happened because of small changes?
That conclusion is incorrect. The change happened because of underlying need for that change. In case of smoking, because smokers are much more likely to die from cancer.
In case of sugary drinks, the need to change is not as strong. That is why restricting advertising is sufficient. Well, may be they will tax sugary products, but banning sugary products will NOT happen.
In any case, whether we need to do the next step or not -- we will decide based on analysis of previous step. That decision is much more likely to be correct if we do small steps, instead of allowing ourselves only do big changes.
>... so you made a conclusion that political change happened because of small changes? That conclusion is incorrect. The change happened because of underlying need for that change.
But that's not true. We're talking about most cases of political change. A lot of it doesn't happen because it needs to happen, a lot of political change happens because it's beneficial (profitable?) for someone for it to happen. Do you really think that companies selling juice are unhappy with "sugary drinks" being demonized? Of course they aren't, because those sugary drinks are their competition. If society cared about the health impact of sugary drinks then juices would be right there next to soda on the chopping block, because they have the same sugar in the same amounts in the juice as the soda does. Yet essentially all of the bans on sugary drinks conveniently don't affect juice at all. The only thing juice has over soda is that it might contain vitamins. That's it. In every other aspect, even minimally processed juice (just fresh pressed fruit into juice), is as bad as soda.
When somebody tells me that this whole thing is for our benefit and that we make decisions based on analysis, then I don't believe them, because the decisions that have been made clearly aren't based on fair analysis. The decisions that have been made are clearly benefiting some people over others and crusaders carry out their will. Then decades later they will complain about how they were lied to.
>Well, may be they will tax sugary products, but banning sugary products will NOT happen.
MAYBE? This is already reality in a lot of places. That ship has already sailed years ago.
Of course they're not going to straight up ban sugary drinks, because that is literally impossible. What they can do and what they actually do, is target certain types of "undesirable" goods/vices to pick winners and losers in business.
Do you really think that companies selling juice are unhappy with "sugary drinks" being demonized?
That’s not really accurate: “No soda or juice to be offered with kids meals in California under new law authored by Central Coast senator”
Restaurants will still be able to serve soda or juice with kids meals on request, but those sweetened drinks can no longer be advertised, or listed, as part of any combo meal intended for children.
even though the apple juice contains no added sugar, it would be banned as a standard choice starting in 2019.
> Almost any kind of change starts small and then builds up. I don't see anything to indicate that banning ads isn't just the first step in the process. Cigarettes have become more and more restricted over time and they also started with banning ads.
Cigarette commercials have been banned in the USA since 1969[1], but smoking is still allowed. So I cannot agree with your concerns. The advertising ban and taxation of unhealthy products that impose externalities on society have proved far more effective than outright bans.
> If this doesn't alarm you yet, then will you be alarmed once they start banning ads for meat?
No. I'd even welcome that. The same applies to sugar, alcohol, marijuana and salt: Don't ban them, tax them and maybe restrict advertising for them.
So you would be in favor of banning advertising of meat products and levying a sin tax on meat? While we're at it, why don't we just make being poor or sick illegal? Sorry, I mean that we should impose a tax on them, because they impose externalities on society.
I'm just wondering, are you in favor of such schemes that would target things you like and enjoy too? Say, computer use. Extended computer use is harmful to people's health, so we should levy a tax on it.
This conversation has completely gone down its own slippery slope and I shouldn’t be piling on, but: if the choice is between taxing income (which is literally people contributing to society in the most direct way) and something like meat or, hell, unhealthy amounts of computer use (whatever that is) then yes please.
Don’t forget we’re currently taxing income at obscene levels, in absolute terms. It means we disincentivise people from working, which is absolutely wild, considering. If you could start with a clean slate and tax anything, what would you choose? Sin taxes or income taxes?
Government revenue is fungible, and the more income from other sources, the less is needed from income. Until we have income tax (at least lowest bracket) down to 0%, I say tax the hell out of everything actually unwanted.
(Signed: a meat eater who would gladly pay meat tax)
Singapore is famously the country that banned chewing gum. Personal freedom has never been a priority there.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing, or a good thing, it's just different. There are a number of ideas they've successfully implemented there that would never fly in other countries - ethnic housing quotas, for instance. It undoubtedly works in reducing residential segregation, but I don't know if it's worth the cost in not letting people live where they want.
While the stated goal is indeed reducing residential segregation, it also has the suspiciously convenient side effect of ensuring that every voting district has a Chinese majority.
Erm, we just killed the food pyramid which was held up as a standard of health for 30 years. Are you sure you want to enact bans on what the government thinks is unhealthy?
There are a whole bunch of materials in the natural world that we just assume are safe because they've been around 'forever'. If you're going to use science as your standard for bans, there are billions of dollars of tests to do.
There's some dark math to be done on the benefit of a human life vs the cost of saving it. Maybe ten guys drinking infinite soda are keeping 100 at work in soda companies, providing for their families.
Banning advertisement is the nice way to reduce the social costs of universal healthcare as it only act as a industry regulation.
What follows is usually not bans but taxes. As an example, Sweden uses a rather significant tobacco tax helps to offset the increased healthcare costs. Same for alcohol and now they are considering the same strategy for sugary drinks and sweets.
Once culture has change and almost no one buys it anymore, and the cost makes the product completely uninterested for new customers, then politicians can start to discuss bans of the product itself.
There are signs that demand for sugary drinks are on the decline naturally e.g. demand for sparking water has increased as people look for alternatives to drinking a coke. And there was a recent article on how juice consumption has dropped to new lows...
One of the unfortunate side effects of the SF tax though is that an $8 canister of sports drink powder (essential to provide calories and minerals during longer periods of exertion) has a $7 tax. I don't think a tax approaching 90% is in any way just.
In this specific case. The drink facilitates athletic activity, and taxing it as if it harms health is ludicrous. Honestly I think the whole sugared drink tax is a bit ridiculous, but taxing a sports drink mix at 90 effing percent when a soda is taxed at a few percent can't be the true intent.
I'm not sure how banning advertising for something destructive and unhealthy is nearly as much of a slippery slope as you are implying.
Does it really seem like someone violating your choices because you aren't being fed certain advertisements? I haven't heard of anyone complaining that they never see ads for cigarettes anymore.
Personally I believe that this is the end state of socialized health care, and I'm afraid we'll see it implemented on a wide scale within the next 20 years. It'll likely start with a hate tax, which is already in affect in a handful of locations.
The only real question to me is which will be banned 'for the good of society' first: sugar, or meat? Meat has the extra argument going around of having an impact on the climate, and some studies say it can be bad for health. Sugar of course is bad for health in large quantities.
The U.S. already has plenty such laws without socialized healthcare: cigarette ads are banned, in some places you’re not allowed to sell sugary drinks that are too large etc. Drug prohibition is probably the most prominent example, but we’re seeing efforts to decriminalize those concurrent with efforts to socialize healthcare. I think your concerns are unfounded.
> cigarette ads are banned, in some places you’re not allowed to sell sugary drinks that are too large
It sounds to me the slippery slope has already started? Hate taxes on cigarettes are a thing everywhere, some places have a sugar tax already. It's not banned, but it is controlled already.
> The only real question to me is which will be banned 'for the good of society' first: sugar, or meat?
At this moment, there are more countries that subsidize them than countries that ban them or tax them extra.
So my tax money first goes to allow people eat more meat and sugar, and then to pay their medical expenses caused by excessive meat and sugar consumption.
When those start to have a noticeable impact on society, I'd imagine yes, they'd start to do something about it. Right now, diabetes is indeed a serious problem.
> The cost burden from diabetes, including medical expenses and productivity loss, is expected to rise from beyond $940 million in 2014 to $1.8 billion in 2050. The prevalence of diabetes among Singapore residents (Singapore citizens and permanent residents) has increased over the decade. [...] Table 2 shows that even after accounting for Singapore's ageing population, the prevalence of diabetes in Singapore (10.5 percent) is higher than the world's average (8.8 percent). Rising obesity is also a significant contributor to the rise in diabetes prevalence. [1]
> Diabetes is a serious health concern in Singapore. One in three Singaporeans
is at risk of developing diabetes in their lifetime. [...] The Ministry of Health (MOH) launched a War on Diabetes (WoD) in 2016, in response to the significant health and societal burden posed by diabetes, and established the national Diabetes Prevention and Care Taskforce (“Taskforce”) to
spearhead a whole-of-nation initiative to tackle diabetes. [2]
I suppose the argument is frequency of the activity, balanced against the expected skill of the person doing the activity. I am not an expert car driver -- I just do it everyday. That's different from an F1 driver; such a driver is fundamentally engaging in a much higher risk activity, but they are probably very well trained.
Skydiving medical costs are pretty small. But something with a big impact such as those new electric scooters get lawmakers to quickly act. Speed limits, restrictions on where they can drive, helmet requirement... all of it is being contemplated by regulators everywhere. Because they are widely used and pretty dangerous.
Extreme activities have a low probability of resulting in anything bad (especially with the gear and protocol we have today), but the impact can be high when it happens -- though if we take the summation across the population the overall impact is low because only a small sliver of society will participate.
Sugar consumption has medium probability of leading to poorer health outcomes, and impact is also medium, but I suspect the overall payoff (or harm in this case) is much higher when summed across the population.
So yes, from a purely rational perspective, we should try to stop people from doing things that harm the system as a whole.
If they want to do things that harm themselves at a localized level (with no 2nd or 3rd order effects -- though this is rare), then on balance policies should allow them to.
When I learned skydiving in the early 2000s, I did about 50 skydive jumps; I was still a rookie. In France, where I learned, I found the industry very well regulated with the highest security standards. I am glad I was able to enjoy this in the safest possible conditions.
It's not a useless post at all. It's sometimes difficult to quantify the negatives and positives of an activity. For example, eating meat. I have heard a lot about how eating meat is harmful to people's health and our environment. Shouldn't we ban that as well?
> It's sometimes difficult to quantify the negatives and positives of an activity
So from this you talk about banning them, right? Except you ban everything because everything has a risk, which is something no-one would accept. Alternative is you try and answer the question instead of asking it.
A utilitarian viewpoint.
A 'You-can-{smoke/drink/parachute/motorrace}-if-you-have-enough-money-to-cover-your-own-hospital-costs' approach.
An attempt to quantify where the line should be drawn, which is what I was getting at.
Or not ban them at all, as some people will propose, which certainly has some merit.
Hand over that decision to the government (which seems to be happening anyway) and wash your hands of it as an individual - the conformist approach.
And doubtless others.
Don't ask obvious questions, questions are easy, and this one is trivial to ask. Try to answer them instead.
I like Singapore too and have lived there. Other countries could learn a lot from how Singapore is run but it has it's own worts. It's very dystopian in certain regards. It's a really good example of the trade off between freedom and safety.
Ads are by definition something that impacts other people.
They should be heavily regulated, with minimum information, maximum frequency, truth requirements, format restrictions, elimination of confusing language, and anything else that becomes a problem. I'm all for allowing ads and their platforms, but there is no way they can be free.
This seems a bit extreme, but neither would I describe it as a utopia. Life is great if you're rich, and noticeably better than most of neighbors if you're not, but there's an awful lot of pressure on all levels of the pyramid except maybe the very top.
Imagine 50 years ago they had passed a law to ban any advertising of products that are not low-fat or non-fat. That research turned out to be wrong and eating fat is good.
The problem with this has nothing to do with the freedoms of sugary drink companies, but rather with thinking that controlling EVERYBODY will solve the problem. You can ban all the ads, fat people will still find their soda fix somehow. Protecting children is one thing, but banning them across everything is really more of an exercise of authority, rather than a useful policy.
It’s a “friendly authoritarian” surveillance state. It’s great if you obey the rules, but you sound like you lean toward libertarianism...Singapore is the complete opposite.
Society pays a high cost for eating meat. It takes a lot of resources to grow meat for consumption. Furthermore, there seems to be a lot of things pointing towards how meat consumption isn't good for our health. So, let's ban advertising for meat products. Next step we levy heavy taxes on meat products and for the final step we outright ban it. After all, it's for your own good. The state knows best.
All true. I guess the balance of power doesn’t support that, partly because:
1) there is no memetic equivalent of “sugar => calories => fat and ugly”, indeed rather the opposite because of its association with the Atkins diet.
2) farming is a job everyone seems to support even though it’s a small part of the economy, and meat is a cash crop (or am I misremembering?)
> The state knows best.
All true except that. We’ve all got our own examples, when I was at school the (UK) government’s poster-child for “drugs are bad” was a girl who actually overdosed on H2O, yet all the people who I should’ve been able to trust to be honest were blaming MDMA.
It was a jab at authoritarianism. I think that people should be able to consume what they want. I'm okay with warnings and public health campaigns to a degree, but heavy sin taxes go too far. If these sin taxes were there to actually offset the cost to society, then I might consider them, but they almost never do that. At first, maybe, but eventually every sin tax just turns into additional funding for the government.
The argument is that "freedom of choice" is a slippery concept, when you have massified advertisement, which targets people basest neurological triggers to make them more likely to drink soda/drink beer/stuff their face with hamburgers/buy weight loss products/vote for candidate X.
This is not like forcing motorcycle rivers to wear helmets. This is like banning cigarette ads on public spaces.
Cheap sugary food, like cigarettes, get most of their buyers from addicts getting dopamine hits from the ads. This is specially bad because of the unhealthiness of this food, and was definitely the right choice.
Not just health costs, but environment too. Why must we collectively be ok with enabling a profit margin on sugar water that requires factories, immense material resources to transport (cans, bottles) and prioritized placement in global distribution?
The entire grift of the last few decades has been “externalize costs of our mess on the next generation for massive profit.” That’s unheard of. Until the last ~100 years the previous generations messes removed themselves in decades. Ours is such that it may wipe out the species
I am very OK with the masses having direct control over how the global trade system we collectively build is allowed to impact the one planet humans can survive on.
All that production and disposal of aluminum & plastic to carry sugar water one can make at home with simple syrup and flavoring.
At some point we have to force ourselves to look beyond the emotional masturbation we’ve all been subjected to by TV & parents if society is going to move along.
That’s exactly how’s it’s moved along in the past. A true free market of ideas demands it.
We need to get nation states on board and in order to do that must tell aristocrats that the future has no place for them.
Although motorcycling is very dangerous, I don't think riders should be forced to wear anything. Instead I think the manatory training should go to a much more advanced level before you can go on the road.
"In addition to an ad ban, the ministry announced that sugary drinks would also be required to display a color-coded, front-of-pack nutrition label to list nutritional quality and sugar content."
I like Japanese/Taiwanese approach which list percentage of fruit juice (front-of-pack). And manufacturers can't cheat with substitutes like apple cause it doesn't count. This is way more useful for consumers to decide what they want. In countries like Malaysia I have no idea what i am buying (sugar water vs real fruit juice)
The UK has a similar "traffic light" system[0] on their foods. I cannot speak to everyone, but for me seeing red salt makes me look again at other options. It is a gentle nudge but helps.
By contrast US food labeling is an anti-pattern. "Serving size" seems arbitrary and makes it impossible to compare foods even directly next to one another on the shelf (plus they're intentionally unrealistic, like a single chocolate bar having two "servings").
Oh the UK can still do that and achieve impossible (or at least daft) serving sizes. Thankfully they all have to show per 100g as well.
I've a wrapper of a 200g chocolate bar here - sadly now all eaten. Nutrition is per 100g and per 40g serving, except there were 8 rows of 4 chunks in the bar. So a 40g "serving" is 6.4 chunks! Traffic lights on the front are based on the same 40g.
A sane and actually achievable serving would have to be 50g.
And in the US, they started using 3 "different kinds of sugars" to make sugar appear lower on the list of ingredients that are sorted by quantity... i.e.: sugar, high fructose corn syrup & corn syrup
thanks for the info., I didn't know when it started, but either way, it sounds wrong... pretty sure it wouldn't affect most recipes to use only one kind of sugar
Cookies? Swap brown for white in a recipe and you'll wind up with a wildly different product, and they're 95% the same (white is almost pure sucrose, brown has a small amount of fructose and other traces).
Syrups contain quite a bit of water, and differ a bunch in constituent sugars.
In 2016 the rules were updated for certain package sizes to require just that. You see it on almost all >1 to <5 serving packages now, but its not legally required till next year. You can see a bunch of examples on page 6, 10, and 13 - 15 here: https://www.fda.gov/media/99203/download
Arbitrary serving sizes are kind of useless though. In an ideal world, most foods would list nutrition information in two units: per container, and per 100g. You'd be able to tell at a glance a) what you're buying, and b) how it compares to similar items. Unfortunately that will not happen in the United States any time soon.
But you could easily compare multiple brands because they will not have different package or serving sizes to trick the system. Here in germany 100g nutrition labels have to be added, made-up serving sizes can be used too if they want, but 100g nutrition tables are enforced.
Fruit juice is different from sugar water in some ways (for example, apple juice has sorbitol, which promotes bowel movement), but in my view the differences don't matter and they should both be covered under this ban. That much sugar with no bulk is just unnatural and should be viewed as a dessert.
There's no difference between "fruit juice" and regular soda.
The fiber is gone so "fruit juice" will be as easily absorbed as regular juice and the sugar in it is just as potent.
You could argue that "fruit juice" has some vitamins in it, but due to processing much of that is gone, plus you can fortify soda with vitamins as well.
"Fruit juice" doesn't protect you from overeating calories, which is the primary problem with sugary drinks. Think of how it's some work to eat an apple and you'll fill fuller. A glass of apple juice however is the equivalent of 6 apples and you can drink it in a matter of seconds without doing anything to curb your hunger.
If you want fruits, just eat the damn fruits, or otherwise take a vitamin C pill.
I am not saying fruit juice sugar is better. I am saying this kind of information on packaging is useless (because it's at the back of packaging) and I want to know if the "Peach Cola" has anything to do with peach. In Japan/Taiwan it is written that there is 0% of peach. Once you experience this you will love it. Especially when you speak ZERO japanese or taiwanese
I pointed that there should be other information in the front. Consider "Peach Cola" which is sold in Japan. It has 0 sugar but also 0% of peach. I prefer to see fruit juice amount especially when I don't understand Japanese but I can see picture of peach and percentage of peach inside.
>>In countries like Malaysia I have no idea what i am buying (sugar water vs real fruit juice)
In a lot of countries it's safe to bet that you get fruit flavored sugared water. Corruption makes it impossible for consumers to have any chance of real products. Many on HN might not understand but a phone call from "above" can turn away any inspection, and they don't dare to bother you again.
I'm all for choice, let people drink pepsi /coke all they want but let's have full disclosure. Allow them to advertise, as long as they say that it's all junk.
I
Doesn't the nutritional label list "glucose/fructose/sucrose content" though? (I don't know, I'm just asking here)
Nutritionally, simple sugars are the same whether they come from fruit or syrups. Taste-wise they are different, but nutritional labeling is primarily concerned with the former rather than the latter.
I had the pleasure of holding a talk at the same event as Saeid Esmaeilzadeh, a rockstar entrepreneur and chemist in Sweden, and one of the questions he got during his talk was how he could reconcile his drive to be an ethical businessman and supply stuff to the military. His response was pretty long but it made a comparison with the sugar industry (paraphrasing here, sorry Saeid if you're reading this and I got something wrong):
"I would never force my ethics on someone else, I will however criticize someone if they don't think their business model through on an ethical level. You should be able to live with what you're doing, personally, without deluding yourself or being in denial. I think Sweden, a democratic country, has an obligation to make sure that the troops we send for peace keeping purposes have the right gear to do the job. However, I would never, ever, supply stuff to the sugar industry. Even though we've found loads of stuff that could be applied to that field, I just couldn't live with myself. It serves absolutely no utility to humanity, it kills more people every year than war and you're primarily marketing stuff to children to form life long habits. It just doesn't square with my morals but I've met other, smart people who have thought long and hard about the sugar industry and came to the conclusion that it's an ethical industry. Whatever floats their boat, but I don't want to make money that way."
I think he produces ceramic plates for body armor, but he could very well be making weapons too. Either way, he profits off of war.
So, yes, he sees the sugar industry as worse and as something without any sort of utility. Militaries bring security and are necessary, at least in his view, and thus he sees them as a net benefit. Personally, as a software developer, I would not build software for the military especially not anything based off of machine learning because it would be against my ethics, and I think that was his point too; don’t ape his morals, but do at least think whatever you choose to do through.
Ads can have positive effects for society too. Say your hotel is empty and you advertise half price rooms - everyone one wins compared with that being banned.
It's not "effectively" an ad for anything, it's a discussion forum. The fact that it also offers some publicity to YC's business is an additional aspect, but not the main one.
Banning all color in ads, all images/videos in ads, all ads in public (busses, billboards, etc), music in ads. Simply black and white text information (which is what YC adheres to).
Good point. So where do we draw the line between good advertising (i.e. new products, new movie trailers) and bad advertising (i.e. “beauty” product manipulations, sugary drink commercials)?
I would like to see a ban on all ads. I am sick of them. I resent with all my heart that wherever I go I'm bombared with propaganda for products. Nobody should have the right to hijack other peoples attention.
In the absence of official advertising I have a feeling companies would just move to "native advertising", or sponsorships, or paying people to make comments on HN. Being influenced without knowing who the influencer is.
Banning all ads is wrong. Ads help promoting good products and services. If you ban all ads -- less people will be using good products and services, and that will make our economy less effective.
"If you ban all ads -- less people will be using good products and services, and that will make our economy less effective."
That's a strange conclusion, since all products, including terrible ones are advertised. In fact ads are essentially content-free and don't help people decide if a product is good or not. They have zero correlation with the quality of a product.
Some countries like France and Germany have independent organizations that buy almost anything that one can think of, test it and make a list of quality products. That ensures people buy good products and services.
You've made me see once again that ads are essentially worthless for individuals.
but they also allow the advertisers to use the test results in their ads. and that's effective. if i see a test-result in an ad i do pay attention (if i am in the market for that kind of product)
I like professional advertising. Some of the producers of very specialized equipment are very hard to find online and have horrible webpages.
If they didn't show up at conferences and posted ads in the relevant journals and websites nobody would find them even when they're desperately looking for exactly their product.
I asked some people at ESA how they find suppliers and they basically said their predecessors left them them a bunch of catalogues and lists.
What I really hate is advertisement unrelated to what I'm trying to do. When I'm looking at cake recepies I don't want my focus highjacked by camera ads even though I wouldn't mind them when looking for photography tips.
In 2010-11 Singapore there used to be close to zero non-sugary drinks at convenience stores. Even all the teas used to be sweet. Lately they started carrying Japanese brands of non-sweetened tea but for a while if you wanted non-sweet tea you had to make it yourself. Which of course is probably better for the planet but if you're just out and about and wanted a drink from a 7/11 your options were pretty slim.
The big thing lately in Singapore, Tokyo, Malaysia is "brown sugar milk tea". I think it's hit NYC and LA but basically you take a tapoica milk tea but before you put the milk and tea in you coat the sides of the plastic cup with brown sugar syrup. Then, instead of the old tea + milk it's now like tea + cream and far more cream than tea such that it's more like sweetened tea flavored milk than milk flavored tea.
Search for "Tiger Sugar" for I guess the brand the started the new style?
There are apparently the equivilant of 20 teaspoons of sugar in 1 drink. Compare to 330ml of Coke which is about 7 teaspoons of sugar. The Malaysian government put out a warning as they got super popular.
I'm curious why now in Tokyo. Tapioca Milk Tea was popular in Taiwan in the 90s and made it Los Angeles in the late 90s early 2000s. People tried for years to bring it to Japan and I was told it was too sweet for Japanese tastes. But, now it's even sweeter and has some how exploded in popularity to a ridiculous level. It's like every spare store front has started selling.
> Tapioca Milk Tea was popular in Taiwan in the 90s and made it Los Angeles in the late 90s early 2000s. People tried for years to bring it to Japan and I was told it was too sweet for Japanese tastes. But, now it's even sweeter and has some how exploded in popularity to a ridiculous level.
I believe it was around 2011 that the more premium bubble tea vendors in Singapore started offering a choice of how much syrup to add to one's drink (Koi Cafe, which may or may not have originated from Taiwan, might have started this trend).
I'm surprised that this particular service hasn't made its way to Japan.
You won't find many non-sugared drinks in 2019 in Singapore either. I only know canned Oolong Tea which has no added sugar, the rest in e.g. a 7Eleven is overly sweet. It's next to impossible to get unsweetened yoghurt in a convenience store.
The brown-sugar tea is all over the place and if you order some green-tea with 0% sugar they look at you like you're an alien and tell you it will be too sour and not taste good.
Try just getting a traditional "Kopi C" with some Kaya toast, that's probably your sugar needs for a day. Then add in the sugar-water soaked fruity, plus the added sugar in most hawker food and you're not exactly on a stunning diet.
I lived there for 5 years and my word it was tough to cook for yourself. Lucky I lived near a wet market, but otherwise your choices aren't greay
I ordered Kopi-O last week and was annoyed to realise they pre-mixed their coffee with sugar. So literally no option to get "pure" coffee at that stand.
I actually try to remember the eating houses that offer ice lemon tea without sugar (very rare). Usually it's even better quality/fresh at that.
Bravo for Singapore govs! Instead of relying on people not digesting too much sugars, they make the policy surveyed on people to discourage the sugar access, reducing the diabetes risks.
I'd go further than this. Here in Australia, cigarette packets are forced to use bland, non branded packaging. It should be the same for these drinks. They'll be less attractive if they all look the same.
I think we are many many years away from the plain packaging dream. Cigarettes were first plain packaged in 2012 in Australia[0], but doctors and researchers have been drawing links between tobacco and disease pretty much as long as we've had epidemiological tools available to do so [1].
I think this would be great to actually demonstrate what drinks are actually "sugary" and I mean it against drinks that market themselves to be healthy but are very high in sugar
Singapore goes opposite direction as most countries. Personally I think sugar tax is way powerful. Those money can be used to educate people. Banning ads is not going to educate people.
Does it work? I think I'm mostly for the ban but as for a tax... Alcohol is 4x the price in SG vs the USA because of taxes. Has that lowered the percentage of drinkers? SG also has a high tax on cigarettes I believe and they have those really disgusting images of disfigured people from smoking issues on every package yet I believe smoking is growing in SG (please correct me if I'm wrong).
I'd prefer a world where people choose to smoke less and eat healthier. I'm curious what methods are most effective. I believe it was going lower in the USA for a while but then blew up again with vaping? And you only have to visit almost any place in the USA to see we're failing at convincing people to eat healthy.
> Alcohol is 4x the price in SG vs the USA because of taxes. Has that lowered the percentage of drinkers? SG also has a high tax on cigarettes I believe and they have those really disgusting images of disfigured people from smoking issues on every package yet I believe smoking is growing in SG (please correct me if I'm wrong).
Singaporean here. I can get my $2 beers and $12 bottles of wine at the supermarket, so alcohol isn't that expensive. On the other hand, drinking at a restaurant or bar is expensive, but moreso because rent in Singapore is crazy.
I'm not sure about the smoking rates, but I reckon that it has gone down among the younger generation because there's so much else to spend their money on these days — and smoking was recently banned on Orchard Road, which is the main shopping district.
I'm not opposed to this but it strikes me as somewhat weak - if you think something is bad enough to ban visibility of it, why not just go all the way and ban the thing itself. Same with smoking, alcohol, etc.
Of course, prohibition doesn't have a terribly successful history but the whole approach seems odd and inconsistent to me.
I guess the rationale is a pragmatic de-normalising of toxic and addictive but currently fully normalised foods and substances over the long term.
Is this a serious question? Are you talking about voting for politicians? Anyone can start as many corporations as they want.
Also corporations have roughly 100 million shares and anyone can buy a single share, so your formula would give one corporation more votes than the number of people who participated in the 2016 US election.
Do you really think corporations are under represented in the political process?
Because people won't accept outright bans for things that are popular. Change happens through a build up. You start small and keep moving the border of what people can accept until one day you get your desired effect. The slippery slope is essentially how policy is made.
Banning outright vs removing ads is an entirely different ballpark. Adults should have autonomy over their body so long as it does not infringe on others. It's not up to authorities to decide whether individuals trade long term health for short term enjoyment.
It certainly infringes on others in any country with a publicly funded health care system. The individual's bodily abuse is paid for by everybody else.
I would agree with banning any ads for children under 18 years old, b/c they get bombarded with ads for junk food on all media channels. Plus I would agree with media campaigns teaching people that sugary drinks are a leading cause of obesity.
But I disagree with banning ads on sugary drinks specifically because I am increasingly concerned about recommending, taxing or banning foods based on weak scientific evidence and politicians are too quick to pull the trigger in favor of industries that donate money for their political campaigns.
First of all the evidence that sugar directly causes T2 diabetes is weak [1], even if there is an association between sugary drinks and metabolic syndrome, see for example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17646581
You can associate sugar or fat or meat consumption with an increased risk for T2 diabetes, but fact of the matter is that it all comes down to calories, T2 diabetes having an _energy excess_ as the cause and the available evidence for that is pretty solid [3]. When energy excess happens, all markers will start indicating problems, your blood glucose, triglycerides, LDL, etc, all of them going up.
People like to focus on one macro-nutrient, or another and it is true that they aren't the same ... for example fructose might give you non-alcoholic fatty liver disease before glucose or saturated fat are able to. But only when consumed in excess, only when it's not burned for energy and the liver's glycogen stores are full, only then fructose starts to become a problem. And if you eat a lot in excess, it doesn't really matter what you eat, as you will get a non-alcoholic fatty liver.
Going back to sugary drinks ... the reason for why I agree with banning ads for children and teaching people that sugary drinks are toxic is because it has been shown in studies that sugary drinks are not satiating at all and will make people overeat. This has been seen in other foods as well, what researchers have called the "cafeteria diet" [2]. The more processed a food is, the less proteins or nutrients it has, the less satiating it is. And sugary drinks are among the worst.
But this isn't related to sugar, but to foods high in calories, low in nutrients and that make people overeat. Unfortunately because the "calories in, calories out" model appears to introduce "personal responsibility" into the mix, people are too eager to embrace other models, like the carbohydrate-insulin theory (CIM), which for now is a work of fiction [3].
The "calories in, calories out" model doesn't have to blame the victim however. The modern food environment is indeed more obesogenic and this can be explained with the effect of highly caloric, ultra-processed foods on our satiety signals, i.e. the main problem is in the brain, the more processed a food is, the more it induces drug-seeking behavior.
So why stop at sugary drinks? What about ice cream or donuts? What about white bread? What about deep fried stuff? Plenty of foods are super high in sugars or fat or a combination, with near zero nutrients.
Demand for food is not infinite (maybe the word you were looking for was inelastic?). And even if you don’t need ads to create demand for “food” that is a broad category with many competing products from many competing providers.
Interestingly the food industry has perverse incentives ... because humans have a maximum limit of food eaten during the day, big companies like Coca Cola can only grow by encouraging people to eat more.
Since the more people eat, the more they spend on food, the more revenue generated.
Therefore food companies are incentivized to produce highly palatable food that trick the brain into overeating. One common strategy is to combine sugar with fat (think donuts), bonus points if it has caffeine too (chocolate with milk). Such combinations are not very natural. You won't find in nature foods that are high in both sugar and fat. And this kind of processing matters. Think of the difference between cocoa leaves and crack cocaine.
And now that we have an obesity problem, the same companies also sell products for diabetics, or diet products with "zero calories" that are highly processed and may contain substances that are damaging to our gut or general health. It's very profitable to create a problem and then to provide the solution too.
And unfortunately you won't see ads for whole foods.
But you will see whole foods vilified periodically (e.g. starchy plants, meat, etc), with ingenuous food companies jumping to the rescue with highly processed stuff. The ongoing race for "fake meat" makes me cringe.
Demand is not infinite. The demand is distributing among a wide range of available choices, advertising aims to change that distribution towards the advertisers products.
Banning products that a sub-population of people are effectively addicted to has a long, multi-instance history of not working and instead contributing to crime (see various drug prohibitions). A product being banned can actually be a form of advertising (or at least production of demand) by suggesting it is risky, cool, or potent in some way.
On the other hand, banning advertising for a category of products, or restricting the advertising to fact-based, or forcing risk factor inclusion, can help produce or accelerate cultural shifts that reduce the demand for the product.
How adout we stop arresting non violent offenders? Then I'll be impressed. This is fake crap news and hn upvoters should be ashamed of themselves. Furthermore, in Seattle, the sugar tax doesn't apply to the home town hero, further sealing their monopoly as they hand wave through social issues.
They should also penalize gluten-containing products (and that's not just foods, e.g. shampoo may contain gluten too). Google zonulin, leaky gut, wheat belly and microbiome diet to find out why.
I believe (given the information you can find by googling the subjects I've listed, it is scientifically-backed in reasonable degree, you will find references to scientific papers in the books too) gluten is the second if not the first cause of the obesity epidemic.
TL/DR: besides being very bad for people with genuine celiac disease gluten (via zonulin) disregulates intestinal wall tight junctions in generally healthy people causing systematic inflammation, immune system problems (including weak immunity, allergies and autoimmune diseases) and metabolic syndrome (which means obesity and increased risk of diabetes as well as cardiovascular and endocrine diseases). Meanwhile, you can find gluten everywhere, not only in wheat products. Added gluten increases groceries and cosmetics shelf life.
If I were the one in charge I would order more thorough research and consider ban on advertisements for both sugary and gluten-rich foods + additional taxation on these goods sales.
I am OK though with banning ads for sugary drinks because society pays a high medical cost for damage due to excess sugar addiction/use.
This is like forcing motor cycle riders to wear helmets.
BTW, I worked in Singapore for a while in 2016. Wonderful place! People just seemed happy there, from business people to laborers. If I were younger I might consider moving there for permanent work.